Leo Tolstoy film The Last Station's epic struggle to reach big screen

The novel about the illustrious writer has finally reached the big screen - after 18 drafts, 20 years and a fist fight

The journey of this film of my novel The Last Station followed a long and winding road, with many rough and dangerous patches. I was always told that the progress - or regress - from book to film takes on average about five years. For me, 20 full years elapsed from the publication of the novel to its embodiment in the cinema, with Helen Mirren as the wife of Leo Tolstoy and Christopher Plummer as the great man himself. Then again, better late than never.

In fact, I should add the four years it took to write the novel to the length of the journey. I started it in 1986. I was living in a small villa on the Amalfi coast with my wife and two young sons, and the idea for a book on Tolstoy had been floating in my head for years. I'd of course read Tolstoy's main novels, but